The awkward title of this good book, Giving Women,
suggests some of the conceptual problems in its contents, while its
subtitle, Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture,
helps only somewhat. Jill Rappoport's book offers a wide-ranging
perspective on the topic of how Victorian women organized and
profited from various kinds of gift exchanges and credits them
collectively with strategies to overcome Victorian prohibitions
against women. Giving circumvents traditional routes to power and
allows women to help the poor, to help themselves to the vote, to
motherhood, to birth control. Rather than focusing on familiar
ideologies of Victorian womanhood, the book explores ways that
women circumvented barriers to make differences in the world and in
themselves. "Giving," a present participle, indicates active
exchanges. The book is not so much concerned with what constitutes
a gift as it is with interchanges and movements, "giving" pushed to
its lexical and figurative limits.

Giving Women starts with the premise that literary
texts "reveal a more nuanced understanding of how giving can define
relationships than either literary scholarship or theories of
exchange" (p. 3). Using literary portrayals as inspiration, the
author challenges such theorists of the gift as Marcel Mauss and
Jacques Derrida. In pointing out that Derrida's principles do not
apply when considering women's ways of giving, Rappoport deploys
feminist strategies that place women in the center of the
discourse.

In considering "middling classes of women," Rappoport discovers
areas where women gain by energies of exchange (p. 3).
Anthropological theory posits gifts as forming alliances through
obligation; women's giving becomes a tool for gaining power and
authority. Here, readers may find themselves either dizzy or
dazzled by the varieties of exchanges that Rappoport finds implicit
in literal and figurative senses of the words "giving" and in
"giving women." As such, giving encompasses almost everything
involved in exchanges, including gifts from God, gifted writers,
the gift of freedom, martyrdom, sacrifices, giving up, offering
secrets, and sharing thoughts about others (gossip?). Giving often
involves taking, as in taking pleasure and taking charge. Giving by
and of women constitutes a powerful dynamic for constituting
identity, community, and social change. The concept threatens to
collapse under the weight of meanings.

The first chapter, on Victorian gift annuals, explores not only
the phenomenal success of miscellanies as gifts, often by women to
women, but also their content as gifts. Rappoport asserts,
"Generosity seems to inhere in many of the contributions
themselves," including not only the "giving forth" of prose but of
philanthropic topics, such as building a church in South Africa and
saving widows and slaves (p. 21). Many of the stories, she argues,
promote generous impulses, such as a story of the gypsy mother
converted to Christianity and made marriageable. Rappoport provides
a different perspective on the proselytizing sentimentality that
might dismiss such writings, deeming them not as generous gifts but
as homogenized, feel-good opportunities. Reading tales of
oppression, some readers might be moved to action. Abolition
activism, Rappoport points out, coincided with the popularity of
the abolitionist matter in annuals. Synchrony does not argue for a
causal relationship. Rappoport stretches the bounds of meaning,
moving from writing about slaves to freeing them: "As a gift,
abolition was an intimate, personal offering" (p. 29). Sentimental
reading might change hearts and minds, as the Victorians and
Rappoport believe.

Subsequent chapters examine a Victorian world—fictional and
actual—through the lens of gifts to and by women. Jane
Eyre (1847) can be considered "a large-scale attempt at
taking time to consider the gift and its power to shape
relationships" (p. 45). In Cranford (1853), a "system
of gift exchange . . . reworks material limitations, turning these
women's lack of extensive private property to their advantage" (p.
68). Rappoport believes that telling secrets as a form of giving
creates a circuit of sympathy resembling the first law of
thermodynamics. In Goblin Market (1862), survival
through sisterly generosity draws upon religious metaphors mingled
with parables about market economy: saving and salvation,
sisterhoods and sisters. The figurative language of these literary
chapters argues by means of metaphors and similes. They demonstrate
a play of mind that may explain the author's belief in the greater
truth of...

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